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Santa Monica-based VideoAmp raised $2.2 million in funding late last week, showing a growing interest by investors in understanding how companies can use better understand and use video ads.
VideoAmp unifies video advertising across all devices. Their platform gives advertisers one place to buy, measure and optimize video ads on television, mobile and desktop. Earlier metrics such as the Nielsen Cross-Platform Campaign Ratings didn’t get enough insight into how advertisers can tweak spending to get the best results. “It’s pretty much common knowledge that video consumption has been continuously shifting to digital video. The eyeballs have shifted, but the advertising strategies are just beginning to think cross channel. We realized that despite the digital video space being crowded, no one has built a platform to cross channel optimize from the ground up, so we did,” said 23-year old co-founder and CEO Ross McCray.
In other words, it means being able to take data and know when spending more money on one platform doesn’t convert another customer. VideoAmp can identify those points and help customers spend their video advertising budgets on campaigns that will reach new viewers. According to the company, the platform can increase reach and will decrease costs by 30 percent.
The platform was built from the ground-up. Engineers and data staff is at the core of the company and VideoAmp will use the recent funding round to further build out that team. “Currently we are 80% engineers and plan to keep it that way for the foreseeable future. We are a technology and data company at heart,” said McCray.
Being innovative is at the core of their mission. “Our entire technology stack is on the cutting edge. For example, we built the VideoAmp infrastructure on Apache Spark, which allows us to do things like Map-Reduce 100x faster than traditional Hadoop methodologies. This gives us the ability to do things that others in the space can’t,” said McCray.
Immediacy is another selling point for potential clients; for VideoAmp, real-time reporting means updating their data every three seconds.
Investors in the latest round include ZenShin Capital, Wavemaker Partners, Simon Equity Partners, and Anthem Venture Partners.
